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| Current protective style, kinky twists. |
First of all, I had always wanted
to do something other than weavons, braids or relaxer. Weavons made me scratch
my scalp like a crazy person, and then braids…..well I always dreaded spending
long hours at the saloon getting the attachment fixed to my hair and they hurt
so much afterwards. As for relaxers, I never really liked getting relaxers on
my hair. It hurt so much and it made my hair thin and weak. Also whenever I
retouched my hair with relaxer, I would get burnt scalp and afterwards get
flaky and funny white stuff which I found difficult to deal with and it was
embarrassing as well. I used relaxer because it was what everyone was doing and
I never knew any other way to manage my hair other than getting it relaxed. Recently
I was seriously overwhelmed and should I say “disturbed” by the increase of the
use of expensive weavons called “Brazilian Hair and co” in Nigeria. I always
thought to myself “..there should be something much more than this”. Now don’t
get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with buying and fixing Brazilian hair. So
I am not despising or hating on anyone just that I feel it’s a bit too
artificial and in my opinion “not natural”.
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| See how much natural growth I had? I wish I went fully natural then. |
Sometime in 2010 I had about 6
inches of natural hair growth (“undergrowth” as we call it in Naija) underneath
my relaxed hair and I really wanted to go natural but I didn’t have a clue
about how to handle my really coarse natural hair. I even took a couple of
pictures and uploaded it to facebook, telling everyone I had gone “afro kinky”. Above this paragraph is a picture of myself then. However, after a couple of
days of struggling with the two textures in my hair (relaxed ends and
undergrowth), I gave up and went back to fully relaxed hairL.
I didn’t do any research at all about transitioning to natural hair! Recently I
was browsing through the internet looking for a unique hairstyle to do and I
came across this Youtube channel called “Beautifulbrownbabydol” and that was
when I discovered the African American natural hair community. It was amazing
to realize that there is a huge and I mean HUGE community of “natural sistaz”
out there. There are so many inspiring vlogs and blogs that left me saying this
to myself “Why didn’t I think of coming to the internet to do this research
earlier?” But anyway, I finally decided to go “napptural” as the natural hair
community would put it and I am not going back!
My hair was three weeks post
relaxer when I made up my mind to go napptural, of course that was my very LAST
relaxer. Some of the sites were so informative and inspiring, having this
friendly “you can do it too” tone to them. My most favorite was www.naturalchica.com,
her vlogs and blogs are so informative and well edited so it made it easy for
me to follow. She also has contributors in form of doctors and specialists
whose articles I found really helpful. I also liked www.nappturality.com and Carol's Daughter www.transitioningmovement.com, I got a
lot of tips from them too and so many others. I read a couple of articles by two hair specialist
Dr. Kari Williams and Dr. Pheonix, you can find a link to their websites on the
useful links section of this blog. After all my research I opted to take the “long
grow out” route of transitioning for a number of reasons. First, I didn’t want
to do anything drastic because I didn’t want to be freaked out. Second my
husband was totally against me getting a low cut, so I was left with the long
grow out route other than the “BIG CHOP”. The long grow out means that I would
let my real hair grow gradually while i still kept my relaxed ends. So as
time goes on I would have to deal with two hair textures, the relaxed and the
natural curly one from the roots. The big chop means I either shave my head
bald or trim a huge chunk of my hair off depending on how much relaxed hair I
have!
